News Roundup
- An okay article (“Why Africa’s National Parks are Failing to Save Wildlife”) with some terrific and nuanced comments folllowing.
- A British otter has been spotted climbing a tree. I have failed to come up with a sufficiently dry comment about the non-news-worthiness of this story. But then, why am I linking to it?
- Yasuni NP has been getting some attention as one of the most biodiverse areas in the world, after a new paper in PLoS ONE pretty much confirmed that. You may recall Yasuni as the unfortunate hostage of Ecuador’s President Raphael Correa.
- Conservation biologists are kind of lazy when it comes to publishing.
- Java’s increasingly empty forests are dwindling to just 10,000 hectares (about the size of San Francisco County).
- The world’s ‘most miserable looking creature‘ (click through, seriously. You do not take animals that evolved in pressures many times our atmosphere and put them in a lab. Of course it’s miserable) is maybe going extinct.
- New sighting of ivory billed woodpecker probably not an ivory billed woodpecker.
New Year News Roundup
- Happy New Year, the UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity.
- On Monday, a ban on red snapper fishing went into effect. Surprise, the fishermen are not happy. The decline is estimated to be about 97% in 60 years.
- The sea lions of Fisherman’s wharf, who showed up after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and whose disappearance was causing some consternation, have been found off Oregon, where there’s better fishing in an apparent El Niño year.
- SEED magazine interviews Paul Ehrlich. “I don’t think I’ve seen a single scientific review of something I’ve written that says, ‘this is wrong.’”
- Fantastic / superb essay on the great discrepancy between predicted and observed extinctions.
- How did Obama do environmentally? Good not great. From the Conservation Maven, reminding me once again how similar ‘conservation’ and ‘conservative’ look.
News Roundup
- Great pictures and story on the banteng, “the most beautiful of all the wild relatives of cattle.” Compared to the Kouprey, banteng are doing pretty well in SE Asia. But then, the Kouprey are probably extinct. That’s probably what happens when you set aside new land for carbon sequestration, and ignore the threats from hunting. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, one woman is hunting the hunters (and by “hunting”, the headline writer meant tracking and trying to carry out legal enforcement against poaching, not killing in cold blood).
- This paper probably marks the end of the pendulum swing against individual actions in the Global War on Climate Change. If everybody worked on cutting household emissions, the U.S. could reduce carbon emissions by about 20% in the next decade. Call this Obama’s vaunted “Check your tire pressure” initiative.
- This is crazy: some migratory birds push out a second brood after migration. “He noted that orchard orioles might raise a first brood in the Midwestern and south-central U.S. and a second on Mexico’s western coast, yet both sets of offspring find the same wintering area in Central America. The question is how both groups find the right place, since they must travel in different directions.”
- Some discussion has arisen about conservation targets due to a recent publication in Conservation Letters. One problem with setting a target may be seen in Britain, where rare species appear to be increasing in abundance (i.e. doing better), while common species are in decline. Sometimes the whole thing feels sort of like the little boy with his finger in the dam. The newly-released IUCN Red List suggests that about 36% of the species analyzed are threatened with extinction (CJB weighs in).
- Interesting profile of the new National Parks head, Jonathan Jarvis. Jarvis is the first trained biologist to head the NPS.
Posted by Tim on November 9th, 2009 • • Add a comment
Tags: banteng•climatechange•iucn•migration•nps
Tags: banteng•climatechange•iucn•migration•nps
News Roundup
- Argentina, Paraguay join Brazil in pledging to preserve the Atlantic Forest (the “most endangered” tropical forest, down from an estimated 500,000 sq. kms to about 35,000 sq. kms. today).
- Columbia University will not be accepting applications for its 2 year program in environmental journalism, due to falling employment in the field, rising costs of education and lack of financial aid for students.
- This one’s being picked up all over the place: forests in the NW might increase in the next century due to climate change. Although the net effects will be positive (in a value neutral sort of way), there will be a decline in growth at lower elevations, and an increase in growth at higher elevations (= more difficult to log). At, least, that’s what the model says.
- This is kind of awesome. Communities in the Andes are using large nets to collect fog drip to use for irrigation. Although it only rains about 1.5 inches / year in the area, it’s foggy for almost 9 months.
Posted by Tim on October 21st, 2009 • • Add a comment
Tags: climatechange•ecosystemservices•forest•journalism
Tags: climatechange•ecosystemservices•forest•journalism
News Roundup
- Bushmeat hunting in central Africa still classified as unsustainable by TRAFFIC based on data from FAOSTAT (the UN Food and Agriculture Organization database).
- Winner of the Most Depressing Lead of the Year: “Species of plants, animals and other categories of living things are disappearing. And millions of people still live in extreme poverty.”
- Runner-up, division of Applied Ecology: “U.S. researchers say they’ve determined it will not be easy to scientifically predict the spread of invasive plants and animals.”
- On ecology and economics.
Odds & Ends
- The 9th World Wilderness Congress will be held in November in Merida, Mexico.
- Nine thresholds for a safe planet (from Nature)
- Even the most dire predictions from the IPCC were optimistic. It’s already twice as hot as they thought it would be.
- Since it’s getting warmer, kudzu is creeping north to Canada. Hey Toronto, better sleep with your windows closed.
Posted by Tim on September 24th, 2009 • • Add a comment
Tags: climatechange•invasives•ipcc•nature•wilderness
Tags: climatechange•invasives•ipcc•nature•wilderness
News Roundup
- Help conserve the boreal forest in Canada; sign a letter of support for sustainable land-use planning. Scientists only.
- The Pakistan Supreme Court shut down a potential tourist development in a sensitive area of forest in the Punjab. It sounds like (at least from the WWF press release) they were particularly responsive to the argument that the forest was providing an important ecosystem service that guaranteed better water quality. Ecosystem services for the win?
- A quick review of what’s happening in the Endangered Species Office at USFWS. The good news: they’re actually reviewing petitions for listing, something Bush pretty much never did.
- A long essay on the problems with strict protected areas (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4). It’s well-written and nuanced, but as with most critiques of protected areas approach to conservation, it fails to value the importance that some people have for “human-less” landscapes. That is, the inability to distinguish between Manhattan and Yellowstone. They both have humans in them, after all, right? Nevertheless, it does highlight the problems of a PA approach for conservation, which tends to be lacking when criticizing it from a sociological / historical philosophy.
- And yet, here’s an interview with E.O. Wilson: “It sounds immodest but I call it Wilson’s law. It says that if you save the living environment, you will automatically save the physical environment. But if you only try to save the physical environment, you will lose them both…when we talk about the world going green, the media and the public think of pollution or fresh-water shortage. They understand, and want to do something. But that is the physical world; concern for the living environment has been slow to take off.”
- Good article on assisted migration, though it could’ve been better with a recognition that species might be considered, biogoegraphically, more or less native to a continent. Migrating them to the next mountain top is really different from moving them across an ocean.
News Roundup
- Sumatra may get additional forest lands conserved through a pretty large ($30million over 8 years) debt-for-nature swap, negotiated by CI.
- First bald-faced songbird in Asia described by WCS scientists in Laos.
- Oysters are returning to Chesapeake Bay. Or, we’re bringing ‘em back. Successfully!
- In the same issue of Science that reported the oyster comeback, there’s optimistic news on the world’s fisheries. As pointed out in that article, this study was a follow-up to an earlier report that was much more pessimistic. This time, though, the original author teamed up with one of his fiercest critics, which is pretty sweet and sort of hard to imagine.
- Here’s an interesting, short note on the Mountain Gorillas in Bwindi: now that elephants have left the forest, and conservation has prohibited logging, vegetation preferred by gorillas can’t grow any more, so they’re moving out into farms and raiding crops. +1 trophic cascades.
News Roundup
- Trans-Arctic shipping a reality.
- A population of mountain yellow-legged frog re-discovered in southern California during Grinnell resurveys.
- Tiger parts found in taxi in Hanoi.
Posted by Tim on July 28th, 2009 • • Add a comment
aaaand we’re back
- Corey’s got a couple of interesting posts, one on a paper about conservation prioritization based on ecosystem services, and another about succesful conservation in Indonesia (via a TED talk by Willie Smits).
- Salazar has released maps of potential BLM lands fast-tracked for solar energy development.
- 9th Circuit strikes down Bush administration rules relaxing wildlife protections.
- Revkin asks, in a well-linked article, can roads and rain forests coexist? Sure. In the same way that prison inmates coexist.
- Ganges River Dolphins not doing so hot.
- A run down of Sen. Jon Tester’s (D- MT) new wilderness bill.
- Nature-based tourism is both increasing and decreasing, says Balmford.
- How a municipal strike in Windsor, OT changed peoples’ minds about “overgrown” grass.
Tags: protectedareas•yasuni